


The Gun in the Glovebox

by apollos



Category: South Park
Genre: Addiction, Dark, Depressing, Drug Abuse, Drug Addiction, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Multi, No Smut, Pop Culture, Small Towns, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-17
Updated: 2016-09-17
Packaged: 2018-08-15 10:28:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8052808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apollos/pseuds/apollos
Summary: Small town predicts my fate.Or: Kenny effectively ruins lives and cannot, in turn, save them.





	The Gun in the Glovebox

**Author's Note:**

> this is the edgiest shit i ever did write
> 
> i changed by not changing at all, small town predicts my fate  
> perhaps that's what no one wants to see  
> \--pearl jam, "elderly woman behind the counter in a small town"
> 
> and i know she'll be the death of me, at least we'll both be numb  
> and she'll always get the best of me, the worst is yet to come  
> but at least we'll both be beautiful and stay forever young  
> \--the weeknd, "can't feel my face"

**FIRST**

"I can't feel my face."

"It's the coke."

"That Weeknd song is true?"

"Yeah."A

Kenny cuts another smooth line of powder with an expired credit card, then passes the rolled-up dollar bill to Wendy.

"Go ahead," he says when she just sits there and looks at him.

"Oh."

Wendy takes the dollar, drops her head to the mirror. The surface is filled up by her beauty; Kenny leans back, the beginning of an erection creeping towards him. Through the coked-up fog he's still shocked that she and Bebe agreed to join him and Stan in this, though Bebe's always been a bit of a wildcard. She's sitting next to Kenny, a hand on his thigh, her head tipped back on the couch and her eyes closed. She's humming. Kenny wishes she would stop; the sound makes it hard to think.

Wendy sits up, sniffing and rubbing at her nose. She's sitting in Stan's lap; Stan rubs his hand against her hip. Kenny stares, not bothering to hide it. Part of him hopes this is going to turn into an orgy. After all, he's fucked over half of the people in the room, if he includes himself.

"When's this going to start being fun?" Wendy asks Kenny.

"You're not having fun?" That's Stan, his hand still making circles on Wendy's jean shorts.

"Not really." Wendy frowns, touches her cheek. "I can't feel anything."

"Give it a bit," Kenny advises. Beside him, Bebe has come back to life, leaning forward and grabbing for the mirror. Kenny slides it towards her.

They're at Stan's house, in the basement. Since Randy remarried and his wife's young children moved in, Stan's been kicked down here. He's fashioned it into a stoner's paradise: multicolor tapestries hang from every wall, bongs lay unashamed on the surfaces, there's bean bags and a 60-inch flat-screen television on one wall. They're seated around a table that's made to look like a tree, Bebe and Kenny on a couch that had once been in the Marsh living room, that Kenny had watched Sunday cartoons on as a kid, Stan and Wendy squeezed into an armchair that doesn't match. The whole set up reminds Kenny of That 70's Show, but he's the only one in the group who's ever seen it.

Thinking of this, he asks Stan, "Can I get your weed?"

"Sure," Stan says. His eyes have that heavy-lidded look that indicates he's high. He gestures towards the top drawer of his nightstand, but that's redundant, because Kenny knows where Stan keeps his weed as much as he knows where the bathroom is.

Kenny rolls a joint, not in the mood for the fanfare of the bong. He's still hard, thinking about the joint passing from mouth to mouth, everybody's saliva mixing with his. He turns around to see Bebe laying on the couch, her legs straight up in the air; Stan's trying unsuccessfully to capture Wendy's mouth with his own. She looks concerned. Kenny brings the joint to her first.

"You okay?" he asks.

"I don't know," she says, frowning.

"Smoke this. It might help."

"Thanks." It's the coke, maybe, but she's looking at him like she's been dying of thirst and he just gave her water.

Back to the couch, back to Bebe. Her legs go into his lap as soon as he's sat down. Her feet are bare, her toenails painted pink. She's putting pressure on his dick through his pants, thinking she's being slick, but he can feel Stan's eyes on them. Kenny leans back. Accepts the joint when it's passed to him.

There's no grand conversation and it doesn't devolve into an orgy as Kenny had hoped. Instead, Bebe strips to her underwear and gives Kenny a lap dance while Stan drifts in and out of sleep. Wendy frets silently, watching it all, her eyes blown wide. She hoards the joint most of the night. Then Bebe conks out, and Stan's out for good, and they've somehow passed five hours doing nothing but watching Full House reruns. Kenny feels like he's died and come back to life, a big black hole in his life, but his experiences with death have never been like that.

So it's dark in the basement, the only light leaking from the television screen, Bebe and Stan both snoring softly. The room smells like weed. There's still coke on the mirror. Kenny and Wendy are the only ones awake. Sobriety is creeping back to Kenny slowly, making him feel itchy and paranoid. Wendy untangles herself from Stan and pads over to Kenny, standing beside the couch, since there's no room between it and the table for her.

"This wasn't very fun," she whispers.

"Sure," Kenny says, because fun is subjective, and it's not a word he thinks to apply to his and Stan's drugged-up weekends. "What time is it?"

Wendy pulls her phone from her pocket. "Four," she says.

"Cool," Kenny says.

"I'm starving."

Now they're in the car, and Kenny's driving, and he's thinking, I've died like this before, please don't let me go like this, please don't risk Wendy. But never has he brought a friend down with him. Everything in South Park is closed, so they drive half an hour to the next town, in search of a McDonald's.

Meandering around a town that isn't their own, Kenny means to ask, "Why'd you agree to this?" But it comes out, "Why'd you start dating Stan again?"

"I love him?"

"That's a question?"

Wendy breaks the gaze she'd been holding, turns her head to the window. Her long hair hides her face. Kenny is overcome with the urge to touch it, so he does. If Wendy cares, she doesn't say anything.

"You know the band Pearl Jam?" she says after a beat, after Kenny's spotted a McDonald's in the distance.

"They had that song about the school shooter."

"Right. But they have this other song. Something about an elderly woman. Anyway, there's a line in it. _Small town predicts my fate_. That's why I started dating Stan again. Here, I'll play it for you."

The low voice of the singer fills the cab of Kenny's truck; absorbed in the song, he passes the McDonald's, circles around it again and again until it's finished. Maybe he's not actually sober, because he's fucking sobbing, biting his fist so he doesn't make any noise. He feels it in his soul, feels it shake him to his core. Wendy is quiet, looking out the window.

Instead of going to the stupid fucking McDonald's and looking into the dead eyes of whoever works there at four A.M., Kenny drives onto a country road and parks. Wendy seems to predict it, because she crawls over to him. She's not quite in his lap as she was with Stan, but she's there, wide eyes, dark hair.

"Doesn't it get old?" he asks, still crying. "To live here?"

"What's the alternative?" she asks, and it's the most profound thing Kenny's ever heard, because he _has_ an alternative. He could shoot himself in the head right now with the gun he keeps in the glovebox. Could shoot Wendy, too, a power he has not yet realized, that washes through him. Murder-suicide of teenagers on a backroad in rural Colorado; he's sure he's read that headline before.

"Are we gonna fuck?" he asks, instead of shooting himself and her.

"No." But then she kisses him. But then she draws back. "Let's go home."

**LAST**

Years later, four late-twenty-somethings in the same basement, coke on the mirror, smoke that never leaves clinging to the ceilings. Randy's dead, ex-wife gone, the house in Stan's possession. None of them have gone to college. Extended, suspended, in a wasteland of empty beer bottles and weed crumbs, sleeping on mattresses on the floor in a pile, the orgy Kenny had wished for. Murder-suicide, always on his mind. Thinking: what would it look like in the headlines? Nobody would remember. Who would they blame it on? Stan? Stan the man? Kenny remembers the moniker, remembers high school, remembers Kyle in his collared shirts with the silver _K.B_. initial cufflinks and books held to his chest, remembers how he booked it the fuck out of there, remembers the teary fights. Kenny's pretty sure he's the only one who remembers any of it. The only one who feels any of it. It's all been transferred to him. It has to be, he's like the designated keeper of memories in that one dystopian book in high school, the one where they euthanized babies. He acts like he can select, like he can paint his world with the colors of his choosing, but he can't. His world is a muddy fucking orange and brown of everybody and everything else.

He wakes up, he grabs for the bong, for the beer, he dresses in the dark, careful not to wake the others. He walks into the harsh light of day, goes towards his truck. He wants to crash it, wants to drive it off a fucking cliff but they need it.

He takes the gun from the glovebox.

It's an old revolver, his grandfather's on his mothers side's prized possession, left to Kevin when the grandfather died. But then Kevin kicked it, too, a congenital heart decision seizing him in his sleep. They were poor; they didn't go to the doctors. So the gun went to Kenny, and then when Kenny bought the truck, to the glovebox. Kenny cleans it religiously. Buys the bullets on the side so the others don't know. He turns it over in his hands, just like every morning, squinting in the bright daylight of summer. It's engraved, on the side; that was a hobby of his grandfather's. A pattern of swirling leaves.

Then, behind him: Wendy. Wearing an old, oversized shirt, the type of bikini underwear you buy in a pack of five and nothing else, her hair's a mess, she's so _thin_. The daylight is not flattering. She looks tired, but she opens her mouth, screeches, "The fuck are you doing?"

Kenny looks at the gun in his hands. "Nothing," he says.

"What's with the gun?"

"Nothing," he says, and he puts it back in the glovebox. "Get in. Let's go for a drive."

"I'm not going for a drive with the fucking gun in the truck, Kenny."

So they don't go for a drive. They retreat into the house. The first floor and the upstairs are empty ghosts of the rooms they once were, storage for the shit they seem to accumulate over the years. Bills crust on the table. Kenny works literally digging ditches off the side of the road, dirt always under his fingernails. Stan floats between jobs; they never rely on him for income. Bebe waitresses, the fucking cliché that that is. Wendy has the best job: she works at a call center. She's the one who takes the truck most of the time, and Kenny's going to have to relocate the gun if he wants to keep it.

Some habits die hard. Wendy's still pretty liberal. Lately she's been talking about conspiracy theories, shadow governments and inside jobs, and that's a little concerning.

Stan and Bebe are awake by the time they've come back, kissing lazily on the mattress. Kenny goes to fire up the bong. Wendy sits on the side of the bed, watching Stan and Bebe just as lazily. Kenny has noticed that about Wendy: she observes. She participates, too, but more than anything else she _observes._

"Weed's ready," Kenny says, as if he's just made breakfast. But he knows they'll get high then drive to Burger King, gorge themselves. It's Saturday. Bebe has a shift later. She'll bring home dinner, cold leftovers from the restaurant. The food sucks. Kenny will eat three plates' worth.

Between that? Who knows.

But Kenny knows what he wants to happen. He wants to grab the gun and put bullets in all of their heads. He wants to wipe himself clean and stay clean, because that's the hardest part: relearning addiction. He wishes he were gone long enough to make his life a lesson. To help his friends realize what they're doing wrong, what the consequences may be. But it never happens, and every time he thinks it's the last time, it's not. And every time the gun goes back into the glovebox. And every time he wakes up and thinks about the way Kyle's mouth had pinched whenever he saw Stan in the hallway, and how Cartman had openly laughed in their faces, calling them no-good addicts. And every time he logs onto Facebook and sees what people are doing with their lives—Craig and Tweek have adopted a kid! Token got accepted to Harvard for graduate school! Even fucking Cartman has lost weight and owns a successful line of fitness equipment!—Kenny wants to the glove box and get the gun. And every time Wendy plays that stupid Pearl Jam song and she and Bebe slow dance to it, Kenny sits down and he cries and cries and cries until he can feel his soul leaving his body, as if he were to die of dehydration.

A spot of hope: Wendy has found the gun. Maybe—

But no. While Bebe goes off to her shift, and Stan calls their dealer, and Wendy watches whatever's on television and braids her hair, Kenny sneaks out and gets the gun. He goes upstairs, to those ghostly bedrooms, and heads to Stan's old childhood haven. It's been gutted. The bedframe is still there, but no mattress. Drawers are open in the desk, collecting dust. They keep clothes that they've worn to shreds up here, stuffed in trash bags, waiting to be dragged off to the thrift store for donation. He puts the gun in one of the dresser drawers. Later he will go out and buy a lock and key.

As he shuts the drawer for now, again he thinks: just fucking _end_ it, you coward. Just _do_ it.

He takes the gun back out and puts it in his mouth.

Then he puts it away again.

Bills are coming up. Water, electric, cable. He needs to work. Needs to provide. Needs to keep this half-dead horse limping along.

He thinks about calling Kyle, but he's tried that before. Kyle screams at him over the phone, blames _him._ When the group split, Kyle started to spend more time with Cartman and his bleeding heart bled out. Kenny's poor, comes from a broken home; surely he's the one who got everybody in this mess, and not Stan, Stan the man, the disaffected bored cynical suburban teenage kid with a little too much money and free time for his own good. Kyle can't see that. Probably doesn't want to see that. He lives in Arizona, now, where he went to college. Has a nice business job. A beautiful girlfriend and a beautiful house.

Kenny sighs and heads downstairs. Tomorrow he'll buy the lock and key. Today he'll settle in between Stan and Wendy and cut choppy lines of coke. Today Bebe will bring home fried tilapia, dripping in grease, with limp fries on the side they'll slather in ketchup. Then they'll smoke some, and roll around together on the grimy mattress, and fall asleep to sitcom reruns that feel so distant they might as well be projected to them from Mars.

And always, Kenny will think of the gun in the glovebox, of the gun in the drawer.


End file.
